NASCAR Martinsville: What we learned during the STP 500

Snow delayed the weekend, and it was nearly the shortest race in track history

By
Matt Weaver

Mar 28, 2018

Brian Lawdermilk | Getty Images for NASCAR

It wasn’t that long ago that Clint Bowyer was at Martinsville Speedway, wondering if the NASCAR community had already forgotten him.

The year was 2016, and Bowyer was driving for HScott Motorsports while waiting for Tony Stewart to depart the No. 14 by the end of the year. It was a tough season, Bowyer ultimately finishing 27th in the championship standings and feeling like an afterthought not long removed from several championship-caliber efforts with Michael Waltrip Racing.

The media requests were far and few between, and the guys he once raced against were now lapping him on a weekly basis.

So it was somewhat fitting for the 37-year-old to break a 190-race winless streak at NASCAR’s oldest track only two years removed from Bowyer at his lowest professional low. Sure, some great things happened in between with the birth of children Cash and Presley with wife Lorra, but Bowyer sometimes doubted if he would be a contender again.

"Yes, it was pretty dark for a few times," Bowyer said about his time at HScott. "That was a year."

But Bowyer is back in a big way -- and looks every bit like the guy that had four top-10 championship finishes in a seven-year stretch from 2007-2013.

"I haven't won as many races as I needed to, but I've always been consistent, and that was always putting myself in position to have a shot at winning the championship at the end of the year," Bowyer said. "I finished second, had a lot of success in this sport, and being able to shine at the end of the year when the time is right for everybody involved, and over the last few years, I haven't been able to put all that together.

"This is a year that's starting to shape up to where I feel like I'm accustomed to, way back when, when I was confident that we were going to go to the end of the year and we were going to compete for a championship."

And frankly, this is good for the sport too.

Bowyer is one of the loudest and most affable personalities in the Cup Series, and things are just exciting when he is up front. He and spotter Brett Griffin are just a pair of roughnecks on the radio and talk like it while in contention.

It takes all types to build a community, and Bowyer’s presence has been missed up front -- so good for the No. 14 team, Bowyer and Stewart-Haas, but also good for NASCAR because they need characters like this while charting the unknown waters of life after Dale Jr., Jeff Gordon and Tony Stewart.

Parity isn’t always good, and NASCAR’s version has some detrimental side effects.

Unlike IndyCar, which has found a pretty entertaining balance between parity and entertaining races, NASCAR may have a problem with identical drivers turning laps in identical cars with identical lap times -- at least that’s the working theory delivered by Denny Hamlin on Monday after the race.

The STP 500 only produced four cautions, and only one of them was for an on-track incident. There was a competition caution on lap 50, and NASCAR-mandated stages breaks slowed the race two other times. The only on-track issue was for contact between Austin Dillon and Jamie McMurray.

Hamlin blames the availability of driver telemetry data that NASCAR now provides teams.

"All of our cars, whether it be data-sharing, setups that we’re sharing with each other and all that, everyone is getting their car to drive very, very similar," he said. "Even when I would come up on lapped cars, they were running a similar speed to what I was, but I was able to get through traffic better than they were.

"We’ve gotten the cars to where they drive so similar, so when everyone runs the same speed, it’s hard to pass. And with less passing, there’s less chance for incidents."

Sure, short-track racing equalizes the difference in the value between engineering and driver contributions, but perhaps not enough.

Consider for a second that a computer program like Dartfish can take the 15th fastest car and place it directly on top of the fastest car and see exactly where on the track a driver is losing time. The slower driver can now access NASCAR’s telemetry data and see exactly where the fastest driver is getting on the brakes or back on the throttle, and the slower driver can do his best to emulate it.

That could be a problem moving forward, especially on tracks larger than Martinsville.

At the end of the day, the playoff race at Martinsville will be a little wackier because desperation will make for dive-bombs like we saw in October, but Hamlin brings up a topic worth discussion.

Even in his worst seasons, Jeff Gordon could always will himself to a top-five caliber driver at Martinsville Speedway. So it speaks volumes to the current state of Hendrick Motorspors that fellow nine-time winner Jimmie Johnson could only will himself to a 15th-place finish on Monday afternoon.

On the other hand, Alex Bowman and Chase Elliott did finish seventh and ninth, respectively, so it's not all bad, but Hendrick has looked like a midpack team in the first two months of the season.

The Easter break can't come soon enough for the Chevrolet mainstays still looking to get a feel for their new Camaro ZL1.

Sure the team had to expect rookie William Byron to take his lumps in his first year after spending just one, albeit championship-winning, season in the Xfinity Series. But Johnson and Bowman has just one top-10, with Chase Elliott leading the way with three.

One week away from the track to refresh, study notes and fine-tune the Camaro will be good for the flagship Bowtie organization.

More short tracks, please

Even the worst short-track race we've seen in awhile still surpassed a run-of-the-mill intermediate track event.

Even though Bowyer controlled the final two stages of the race, his victory always felt potentially in jeopardy with Kyle Busch within two seconds. All it takes at Martinsville is for the leader to get trapped in lap traffic or overdrive one corner and the second-place driver is right there fighting for the win. That was the case on Sunday. It was a credit to Bowyer that he kept it smooth and got a lot of respect from his lap-down peers in the closing stages of the race.

NASCAR must address its Cup Series schedule after its five-year sanctioning agreement is up after the 2020 season.

Montreal, Iowa, Gateway, Road America and Fairgrounds Speedway Nashville has to be on the table for a series desperately in need of more action-packed races. SMI and ISC can put up all the fights they want, but the industry is suffering with the status quo, and their losses will be worse if NASCAR stays the current path.

Here's the reality of NASCAR's plight:

Over half the races are too long, too tedious to watch and require restarts to generate any sort of side-by-side action up front. That's not a sustainable business model for a sports consuming audience with too many options on their table. Not every race has to be a short track or road course, but right now, there are just too few races that are purely must-see TV and that has to change to generate interest in what NASCAR does on a weekly basis.

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